


Cake and Miracles

by talltrees5



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Birthday Cake, Child Abuse, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Gen, Harry Needs a Hug, He tries so hard, I'm Sorry, Out of Body Experiences, Poor Harry, Pre-Hogwarts, Suicidal Thoughts, he doesnt deserve this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-19
Updated: 2016-05-19
Packaged: 2018-06-09 10:47:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6902716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/talltrees5/pseuds/talltrees5
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry realises that there is no escape from his life with the Dursleys but it doesn't stop him hoping for one.</p><p>or</p><p>The one where Harry just needs to be loved.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cake and Miracles

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first fic and it's unbetaed so it would be really useful if anyone could point out things that would improve the flow, writing style, any spellings etc. (And if you want to beta that would be awesome too.) I would also like to say that I have written before just not fanfiction so don't run away screaming. I'm not twelve, I promise. There is canon-typical abuse in this fic and implied physical abuse so if that is triggering for you please don't read. Tell me if you enjoy this because I'm playing between making it into a series of oneshots or just leaving it as a stand alone.

The bathwater has gone cold. Or was it never warm. Harry doesn’t think he can remember anymore. Only that he is going numb and really he should move, or at least open his eyes. Maybe, he thinks, I should breathe. Maybe, he thinks, my scars are stinging. Maybe, he thinks, my toes are blue. Harry is, for all intents and purposes, a corpse when he is alone, floating and waxy-faced like this. This at least, he can choose. To live or die or neither. It doesn’t really matter anyway because this is not his body. It is the body that cleans Petunia’s house and feels Vernon’s fists and runs from Dudley’s friends. Not his. It washes over him like a wave, the wrongness of it all. Why is he trapped in this solid flesh? Everything is crushing him and suddenly Harry can’t breathe through the desperate instinct to breathe. If he really concentrates Harry can feel himself drifting up out of the water. Slowly, he falls upwards out of himself into the cold air. Freedom. 

But if he stays here too long he will die and that would make Petunia angry, which is never good. When Vernon is angry he hits you and that’s that. When Petunia is angry she refuses to look at you and locks you outside and doesn’t feed you for days. So, yes, he should really get downstairs. 

Would staying here, would dying, be so bad though? The door is locked. He could wait until the water evaporated and the house crumbled to dust and the Dursleys were all gone. Surely that would be less painful than going downstairs on shaking legs and seeing Dudley smiling and his parents smiling back and knowing that no-one could ever smile at him like that.

Then Harry notices that he is shivering really quite badly and his toes really are blue. If he listens carefully through the distortion of the water he can hear an alarm clock ringing. By now he should be downstairs making breakfast. So he concentrates on his blue toes until he can feel with icy clarity the pain of the water surrounding him and the screaming of his lungs for air. Air right now! Then suddenly he is gasping inside his body and getting out of the bath to make sure he’s downstairs in time to sneak something to eat from the fridge before his aunt sees. And really that was all he could ever do - keep going. There was, he decided, no escape from this hell hole short of some kind of miracle.

*

The miracle is called Hagrid.

Of course he does not arrive immediately, but around 4 months later a rather tired Harry finds the first letter and that is the beginning of it. He had eaten tea last night (an entire piece of toast with both jam and butter) but afterwards he had been given strict orders that he wasn’t to go to bed until the kitchen was sparkling. It was not a good idea to disobey Aunt Petunia. This meant that Harry had been up until the sky began to lighten with bleach and drain unblocker desperately trying to avoid the consequences of a single speck of dust discovered the next day. Terror was the ultimate motivation, apparently.

Somewhere deep inside his head there was a part of him that knew the way he lived was wrong - so very wrong - but it was a very small part. Because the beatings hurt, and the starvation hurt, and the lack of love hurt, but when you were in the middle of it you didn’t have time to think about the fact that maybe you didn’t deserve it. You were too busy surviving.

Anyway the boy that left his cupboard that morning left his soul behind. A long time ago Harry had realised that it was a lot easier to have your body starved and beaten if you weren’t inside of it. That morning, the boy walked into the kitchen. It opened the fridge and ate a cold sausage. It heated up the frying pan ready for the bacon. Almost robotically, it cringed as its relatives entered the kitchen one by one. In reality, Harry was flying as an eagle over the Scottish peaks. Great grey walls framed by a clear blue arch of sky were all that he chose to see that morning. Soaring over snow and still water he knew that this was a force not cruel or kind but truthful. A mountain would not starve him or feed him. It would simply stand and watch. So when Petunia said in a deceptively calm voice “Are you even listening to your uncle, boy?” he jumped and burnt his hand with the pan. That would be painful later.

“I told you to get the post and you ignored me you ungrateful brat.” growled Uncle Vernon, his face quickly turning an alarming shade of puce. Realising it was probably too late to avoid a slap now, Harry edged towards the window. Usually he wasn’t hit in sight of the neighbours.

“Sit down please, darling,” Petunia said sweetly, “We can discipline him later.” and then to Harry, “The post, boy, fetch it now.”

And then there it is. The “it” in question being his Hogwarts letter which seemed to know as if by magic that he slept in “The Cupboard under the Stairs” and which seemed far too good to be true. Why, and more importantly who, would care enough to send a letter to a boy like him? “What if,” the insidious little voice inside his head whispered, “It’s all just a trick? It’s an elaborate practical joke to make you feel like someone, somewhere, cares about you.” To Harry this seemed like a reasonable theory. Even the teachers at school regularly forgot his name, so why would anyone care about him? For this reason Harry took no real care to hide the letter and was only mildly disappointed when it was ripped from him. The cold fear on Petunia’s face when she saw the address did change his mind a little though. 

*

“How do they know, Petunia?”  
“I don’t know, my sweet.”  
“But how on earth did they find us again?”  
“I said I don’t know.”

*

Petunia does not approve of the letters but she disapproves more of the attention Vernon draws to the family as he slowly becomes obsessed with outwitting the seemingly omnipotent sender. In the end it is her idea, although planted in her husband’s head, to leave for somewhere remote until, as Vernon keeps saying, the whole ordeal blows over. Better for him to have a breakdown out of eyesight of Mrs Shrew three doors down and then everyone can go back to pretending Harry doesn’t exist. 

That is how Harry finds himself lying on the floor of a leaky cabin on some grey Atlantic rock, waiting to turn eleven. Dudley’s snores seem to rumble almost louder than the thunder overhead and to Harry they sound like a soothing whale song lulling him to sleep. Often, he feels sorry for Dudley; it is not, after all, his fault that his parents are such terrible people and taught him to be the same. He was only eleven and didn’t really understand their actions. To him, discipline probably meant an evening without his X-Box not with Uncle Vernon’s belt buckle. Tonight of all nights, though, he must not sleep. If no-one else is going to celebrate with him, he might as well stay up to congratulate himself on surviving another year. 

The watch on his left wrist is probably wrong, however if it runs slow or fast Harry has no idea. It was the first gift he ever received, even if it was from himself. Last year Dudley had received a brand new Ben10 digital watch for Christmas and Harry had managed to successfully find and hide the old one since then. It had been whilst Marge was over and Harry had been put out the back so that Ripper could calm down. This meant first of all that he might escape being a chew toy for the dog this year, but it also allowed him to sneak around the front of the house and covertly retrieve the old analogue watch from the dustbins. The philosophy was: if no-one else was going to care about him he would have to do it himself. Eventually the faceof his most prized possession reads 12:00. 

“Happy birthday me.” He mouths.

At that exact moment, the door crashes open and silhouetted in the half-collapsed frame stands a giant. Immediately Harry is reminded of those towering Scottish crags which he had only ever glimpsed in his mind. The great face softened by time and cracked into a huge smile. The wiry mass of hair growing wildly in every dierction. Yet a quick internal check assures him that he had not accidentally slipped out of himself and into that half-realm of dreams. This mountainous man stood solid and tangible right in front of Harry is not really a miracle. 

No, the true miracle is the cake that Hagrid fishes out of his pocket.

Later Harry will realise that the only reason he was rescued was because Dumbledore needed a lamb for slaughter, and later still he will realise that Hagrid didn’t know that and cared about him regardless, but in this moment all that matters is the fact that the cake, vaguely crushed, luridly iced and liberally misspelled, has been made for no reason other than to celebrate his birthday.


End file.
